Since it’s the season for music and movie festivals, I have a few movie/video recommendations to pass along to you this month (along with a summary of a couple books I’m reading/working through):
- The Creative Writer’s Notebook: A Creative Journal for Fiction Writers by John Gillard — Picked this one up at Barnes & Noble and am going through it to get my writing juices flowing. It includes exercises inspired by the writing style of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Maya Angelou and Flannery O’Connor, among others.
- Me and Earl and the Dying Girl — Hadn’t heard much about this movie before we saw it, but my wife and I loved it — tackles big issues like friendship, identity, love, growing up, life and death but it does so without feeling heavy-handed or preachy.
- University of Denver Sand Creek Massacre Symposium — This is the first in a series of four videos from a recent gathering on DU’s John Evans Study Commission Report. If you can get past all the titles and introductions of the participants it and its three companion videos are well worth your time.
- A Century of Dishonor: The Classic Exposé of the Plight of the Native Americans by Helen Hunt Jackson — This book was originally published in 1881, but remains relevant today for those of us trying to come to grips with the legacy of how “the West was won.
- “Go Back to Where You Came From” — This Australian reality show tackles the issues raised by the plight of today’s refugees head on.
- The Last Plight — A 10-minute documentary about the lives of Assyrian Christians and Yazidis after their violent encounters with ISIS.
